In general, hand-made noodles such as "Tenobe So-men" (very thin hand-made noodles), "Tenobe Hiyamugi" (thin hand-made noodles) and "Tenobe Udon" (standard hand-made noodles) have been prepared by a method wherein water, salt and others are added to wheat flour and mixed, a soft dough is formed into a rope-like dough and the dough is twisted and stretched out repeatedly into the final products. Such hand-made noodles are especially in favor with consumers, because of their good eating quality or texture in respect of viscoelasticity and smoothness. However, the manufacture of hand-made noodles is complicated, requires a long time and much labor, thus increasing a manufacturing cost. Therefore, it is difficult to provide consumers with the hand-made product at an economical cost.
On the other hand, machine-made noodles have been produced by sheeting a hard dough containing lower amount of added water than that of the hand-made noodles by passing long sheet into strands of the desired width by a pair of cutting rolls. In this case, a series of complex operations including mixing of wheat flour, water, salt and others, sheeting a noodle dough and cutting a sheet into noodle strands can be performed by machines in a short time period, thus leading to mass production of noodles. This gives an advantage of providing consumers with the noodle products at an economical cost. However, machine-made noodles are inferior to hand-made noodles in viscoelasticity, smoothness, taste and others, due to lower amount of added water and easy damage of the dough by sheeting through rolls.
Now, there have been proposed a variety of processes for the production of noodles by machine with a view to produce machine-made noodles having good eating quality or texture and taste comparable to hand-made noodles, in a short time with good productivity.
Japanese Patent Kokoku 6-95904 and Japanese Patent Kokai 7-123902 disclose that the noodles containing higher amount of added water which are superior in taste to those containing lower amount of added water can be produced by maturing a noodle sheet as sheeted by continuous sheeting rolls, stretching the matured sheet followed by cutting into strands, and again maturing the strands, and repeating such stretching and maturing operations several times as desired to deaerate the strands in the mechanical stretching and maturing processes. However, those processes require a multiple repetition of stretching and maturing of noodle strands, for which more reduction in production time has been desired.